While I love all the excitement and details of a wedding day, engagement sessions are unique in their own way. Not only is it intimate, it also gives couples a chance to showcase their personalities and stories through the location and outfits they choose. In this blog, I’m sharing a few tips on what to wear!

I believe that photos that make us happy are mostly because of how we feel at the time the photos were taken. I want everyone to feel their best before they even see me, so I give everyone a portrait guide before each session. Much of that gives some insight to help you decide what to wear. I recommend having two outfits, but some couples choose to wear one, either because they really like it or because they don’t want to take time out of the session to find a place to change. Here are a few tips to help you narrow down your options.

1. Dress comfortably.

You don’t want to remember your engagement session as the day you wore a top that was too tight or an itchy sweater. If it’s 100 degrees, try to wear something that’s won’t make you sweat more. If it’s 25 degrees (like in Katherine and Anthony's session, pictured above), make sure you have layers under your outfit and gloves to put on between photos. A scarf and a peacoat can be just as pretty as a sundress. Check out my Pinterest board for some of my favorite outfits for cold weather sessions!

Wear comfortable shoes! Take it from me: after I finished my graduation session, it was about a half mile walk back to my car. I really didn’t want to make the choice between wearing the shoes that hurt me for the whole session and walking barefoot. If you’re dying to wear a certain pair of shoes for your session, make sure you have a more comfortable pair to change into if you have a lot of walking to do. Here’s a tip that I picked up from my high school color guard days: carefully placed electrical tape on the insides of your shoes can save your feet a lot of pain.

2. Coordinate with each other.

You can coordinate outfits without matching, like the “red top, black pants” my cousins and I would wear for our family pictures at Christmas when we were little. You could choose a color scheme, such as wearing different shades of blue or both of you wearing something red and black. You could also complement each other’s outfits. If your favorite dress is purple and your fiancé doesn’t have anything purple, you can choose an accessory in a similar color to something he does have.

Matt’s blue shirt and red tie both complement the flowers in Amethyst’s dress. Her dress also was perfect for this April session and looked beautiful with the colors of Disney’s Polynesian resort! Which brings me to #3…

3. Consider the location.

You can coordinate your outfits with the color scheme of the location. If there are lots of fall leaves at this location, you could wear warmer hues to complement them. If your session is in the snow (which would be amazing), you could wear bolder colors to stand out. Tori and Michael’s first outfits complemented the colors of the desert garden so well, and their second outfits showed off their matching shoes while coordinating with the sunflowers.

If you’re newly engaged, I hope this helps you feel more confident going into your engagement session!

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I have a lot of pictures to take in the wonderful month of October, and the first were for Sierra and Remington’s engagement session in the mountains!

When I first met Sierra and Remington in July for Sierra’s graduation photos at Clemson, they told me they were about to celebrate their 4th anniversary as a couple. Right before that day came up, Remington told Sierra to make sure her trunk was shut because he got something out of it earlier and he wasn’t sure if it had closed all the way. Thinking he was at work, Sierra opened the trunk to find three boxes with letters and pictures of them together. Remington came from behind the house and proposed! How pretty is the ring he picked out? And yes, I looked all around for red and yellow leaves before Sierra and Remington got there so I could do a fall-looking ring shot, even though it was still a few days before the fall temperature kicked in.

Sierra and Remington told me that they really wanted their pictures to have a pretty view, so I suggested a few places I’d been to in the upstate. They chose Caesar’s Head, which became one of my favorite places in the whole state of South Carolina after I did an engagement session there last fall. Sierra and Remington drove up from Newberry and the sunset did NOT disappoint! There was a small group of people who had come to the overlook to see the sunset, and I heard one kid say, “They look like they’re getting married!”

I’ve found that people in other states tend to forget that there’s more to South Carolina than Charleston, but Charleston doesn’t have a view like this! Check out some of my favorites from this session with an awesome couple in a beautiful place.

Take 1:

Alexis, Skylar and I decided on Caesars Head State Park for their engagement session. None of us had ever been there, but the pictures looked gorgeous. The forecast said it would be cloudy with a 15% chance of rain. Apparently when the elevation is that high, "cloudy" can mean intense fog, so I had to turn my headlights on and drive slowly, even though it was 3:30 in the afternoon. It's hard to get phone signal around there, so I knew I had to just push through and meet Alexis and Skylar at the top to discuss what to do. It was raining when I finally met them, even though the weather channel still said it wasn't. We looked out onto the overlook...

...and decided to come back another time.

Take 2:

There was a freezing cold wind when we came back, but it was sunny and we could see everything. Here's what we saw from the same overlook this time:

Alexis loves elephants, so Skylar gave her this plastic elephant when he asked her to be his girlfriend.

He stuck with the theme when he asked her to be his wife, only this time, there were real elephants involved. They took a trip to the zoo and he got down on one knee in front of the elephant exhibit. Since he didn't actually give her an elephant this time, they bought this little elephant at the souvenir shop afterwards to commemorate the day.

Of course, Alexis had some other cute elephant figurines to incorporate into their session.

The sun made for some amazing rim light through the trees, something we wouldn't have had if we tried to shoot in the fog.

The sunset was perfect, something else we would have missed out on if we'd tried to shoot on that cloudy/foggy day.

There was so much laughter during this session on both sides of the camera. I had such a fun day with them!